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In another sign that Google is serious about NFC, the Internet search giant has joined the NFC Forum standards and trade group as a voting member, the forum announced today.

The forum also announced that chip makers Intel and CSR raised their membership level a notch from associate to principal, the same level as Google. And the forum said other new members had joined, at lower levels.

NFC Forum chairman Koichi Tagawa said the new and upgraded memberships spotlight three trends in the NFC industry–the importance of smartphones to the rollout of NFC, the interest by suppliers of integrated wireless chips in NFC and the growing appeal of applications that use NFC’s reader and peer-to-peer modes, not just card emulation for payment and ticketing.

Google’s membership in the forum follows its launch in December of the first smartphone on the market with NFC capability, the Nexus S, which is made by Samsung Electronics. At the same time, Google said it would incorporate NFC in the latest version of its Android smartphone operating system, Gingerbread. The company is developing an NFC-based wallet and mobile-commerce applications.

Nokia and Research in Motion, also NFC Forum members, have said they will roll out NFC-enabled smartphones this year. Samsung is also introducing NFC to its bada smartphone operating systems. That’s in addition to Samsung’s own Android-based smartphones, such as the soon-to-be introduced Galaxy S II, which will also support NFC. Android smartphones from other handset makers also are expected.

"The smartphones are going to be at the core of NFC applications," Tagawa told NFC Times. "The match for NFC and smartphones I think is better than NFC and feature phones."

Giant chip maker Intel is dominant in the PC market, but the company is also planning to supply chips to smartphones starting this year. NFC is also expected to be embedded in PCs to allow for device pairing and content sharing. Intel has not disclosed its planned uses for NFC.

UK-based CSR, formerly known as Cambridge Silicon Radio, designs chips supporting such wireless technologies as Bluetooth, GPS and WiFi, and its semiconductors have been used by a number of device makers, including Apple, Dell, Nokia, and Sharp. If it adopts NFC, CSR would combine the technology with other wireless technologies–just like rivals Texas Instruments and Broadcom are expected to do. U.S.-based wireless chip supplier Qualcomm is also expected to eventually incorporate NFC in some of its chips.

"Looking at the new memberships and those moving up, I think there is a trend that this integrated chip thing is really going to happen, and I think when that happens, there will be a wider selection (of devices)," Tagawa told NFC Times.

Like CSR, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm are principal members of the NFC Forum, while Broadcom is a sponsor member, the top category.

Principal members are entitled to appoint voting representatives to the forum’s technical, marketing and compliance committees and working groups. They also can seek certification under the forum’s compliance specifications using in-house labs.

Sponsor members have these benefits and also can appoint members to the forum board of directors. That board consists of representatives of forum co-founders NXP Semiconductors, Sony Corp. and Nokia, along with Inside Secure, MasterCard Worldwide, Microsoft, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Renesas Technology, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Visa Inc.

Other principal members include American Express, AT&T, LG Electronics and Motorola.

But of its combined 28 sponsor and principal members, only three are mobile operators, DoCoMo of Japan, U.S.-based AT&T and Rogers Communications of Canada. Such European operators as Vodafone and France Telecom-Orange had been members but dropped out, possibly over disagreements with forum standards.

But Tagawa said he didn’t see the relative scarcity of telcos as a problem. The mobile operator trade group GSM Association attends the forum meetings as a member in the nonprofit category, he said. The forum has about 135 members overall. 

Among companies that have joined the lower ranks of the organization over the past several months are German car maker Daimler and Silicon Valley-based tag maker Kovio.

Daimler is likely interested in NFC to enable customers to tap their phones to unlock their cars and control some of the vehicle’s dashboard or entertainment-system functions.

Kovio makes silicon-ink-based "smart labels," which could be attached to product packages and smart posters in stores to enable consumers to receive product details, promotional offers, coupons, loyalty points and nutritional information by tapping their NFC phones on the tags. The Kovio tags do not comply with NFC Forum specifications, however.

Tagawa called the membership of new companies like these a "very good sign," that members of the NFC ecosystem will use all three modes of the technology–card emulation, reader-writer and peer-to-peer–to connect the "real world and cyber world."